Table of Contents
The Titans are the older generation of Greek gods, the children of Uranus and Gaia who lost their rule to Zeus. I keep meeting them in three different settings on this site: in Greek myth, in the Phoenician sources that identify their leader with El, and in a modern reading that treats them as real, non-terrestrial beings who mated with humans.
The first generation
Uranus – The primordial Age is where I start. Sky and earth produce the Cyclopes, the Hundred-Handers and the Titans, and Uranus shuts the first two groups away in Tartarus. Kronos, the youngest Titan, takes the sickle his mother Gaia offers and overthrows his father. The Titans then rule until Zeus, hidden as a child, grows up and turns on Kronos.
The war on Mount Othrys
Mount Othrys is the mountain stronghold of the Titans, set against Olympus in the story of the ten-year war. On The Olympian Gods I follow what happens next: Zeus and his siblings win with the help of the freed Cyclopes and Hundred-Handers, and the defeated Titans go below. Tartarus: The Abyss Where the Titans Were Imprisoned collects what the sources say about that prison, and Cyclopes: One-Eyed Smiths of Zeus and the Builders of Cyclopean Walls follows the smiths who forged the thunderbolt.
Kronos as El
The Phoenician pages give the Titan king a second identity. On According to Philo, Kronos was a Phoenician deity who was also called El I set out how Philo of Byblos equates Kronos with the Semitic El. The further step to the name Israel rests on interpretation, and direct evidence for it is rare. On The Phoenician history Philo presents his source, Sanchuniathon, and he has no patience with the Greek poets who retold these stories:
Thence Hesiod and the highly touted cyclic poets fabricated their own versions and made excerpts of Theogonies and Giants’ Battles and Titans’ Battles, which they carried about and with which they defeated the truth.
Philo of Byblos, on The Phoenician history
I do not take that as proof that the Greek story is wrong. I take it as a sign that, in the ancient world, the Greeks and the Phoenicians were already arguing over who owned these figures.
Prometheus
Prometheus: The Fire-Bringer Who Warned Deucalion of the Flood follows the Titan who stole fire for humanity. In the Greek flood story his advice lets Deucalion and Pyrrha survive. That ties the Titans to my flood research.
Were the Titans real beings?
In The Titans – Non-Terrestrials Mating with Terrestrials Paul Wallis points out that the first-century historian Josephus treated the Titan story as history and linked Uranus and Earth producing Titans with Genesis 6, where non-terrestrial beings mingle with humans. Josephus, in Wallis’s account, believed descendants of such beings were still living in his own day. That is Wallis’s reading of Josephus and I cannot confirm it, but it is the bridge between the Titan pages and my pages on the Nephilim and the giants.
Related pages
- The Titans – Non-Terrestrials Mating with Terrestrials
- Uranus – The primordial Age
- Mount Othrys
- The Olympian Gods
- Tartarus: The Abyss Where the Titans Were Imprisoned
- Cyclopes: One-Eyed Smiths of Zeus and the Builders of Cyclopean Walls
- According to Philo, Kronos was a Phoenician deity who was also called El
- Prometheus: The Fire-Bringer Who Warned Deucalion of the Flood
- The Phoenician history
For every page I tagged with Titans, see the Titans tag archive.
